Semele

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A WISE fellow, Handel. Why didn’t he write any English operas, despite the frequent begging of his contemporaries? Because he knew that they would be turned into sniggering vaudevilles and passionless artifice, never performed without deflating self-parody, that’s why.

Lucky he didn’t live to see this production, which first appeared at the Royal Opera in 1982 and bears all the marks. Picture an episode of Blackadder performed by the cast of Are You Being Served? and you have the flavour: camp, arch, knowing — not generally words you’d apply to Handel’s muse — it is really one revival too far.